Found Postcard
From a postcard I bought at the St. Lawrence Antique Market:
*******************************************************************
The cab was yellow, like on some album cover and it smelled like a barber shop. The driver was older, maybe sixty, and the car was like his study. Stale cigarette smoke, Old Spice cologne, coffee and the sports section. We drove in silence, his day having grown long and tired.
The concert was at a community centre, in the auditorium of what was once a large high school. The seats were designed for teenagers from the 1940’s, and sitting there I imagined all the energy once contained within, all the assemblies, plays, stolen kisses and heartfelt speeches. The opening band was called Amina. They were four serious looking Icelandic women clad in the plain dresses you might see on pioneers. They looked plucked from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, like dolls you’d want to take home and put on a shelf. They played laptops, saws, xylophones and violins. The music was strange and precious, suddenly crytstallizing into beauty, and when the tall one started to groove and lose herself to the process of her creation, I wanted to move to Iceland.
When the blonde one spoke, so sweet and formal in an accent that could only be a seductive invention, my heart did break, and when they finished performing the astonished crowd exploded into applause, everybody standing, bringing forth shy, unexpected smiles from the band.
The main show was Sigur Ros behind a scrim. Implied but not see. Lighting and shadows, silent but for their music. They all seemed so fragile, so vulnerable, as if somehow crippled by their immense musical talent. They played for 90 minutes and all of us in the crowd were drifting in and out, sometimes deeply connected, other times lost to a point in our past or imagined future. They were called back three times, barely smiling, but still smiling, and they applauded back at us with those thin, thin arms that had called forth such magic.
